$3.3B Desert Schools Commits to Corelation Core

Core processing specialist Corelation, a 2009 startup, has landed its 20th client and largest by far, the $3.3 billion Desert Schools Federal Credit Union in Phoenix.

The 308,000-member Arizona credit union plans to complete its conversion from its current platform, Fiserv Signature, to San Diego-based Corelation’s KeyStone solution in the fourth quarter of 2015, said Desert Schools EVP Ron Amstutz.

“This is a once-in-a-generation opportunity for us to create a strategic opportunity at the level we’re looking at here,” Amstutz told CU Times on Friday.

More than 150 employees and volunteers had a voice in the two-year decision-making process, the credit union said in its Monday announcement.

Amstutz said the Signature platform had been in use at Desert Schools since 2009.

“We wanted to move from a bank platform to a credit union platform,” Amstutz said, also citing Corelation’s 24/7 processing and the ability to hire IT employees directly from local universities who would be familiar with current technology, including code, used in the Corelation platform.

Asked if he was concerned about a credit union of that size signing on with a platform currently live at only about a dozen credit unions, Amstutz said he had confidence in the Corelation technology and its team, led by John Landis, a founder of Symitar in 1984 and architect of some of the mostly widely used core platforms in the industry, and veteran core processing executive Theresa Benavidez.

“This team understands the credit union industry, and the pain points of being tied to a rigid, inflexible core system,” Amstutz said.

Benavidez said, “This is a game changer for us. We haven’t had a chance to get in front of a lot of billion-dollar credit unions and this opens a whole new market for our technology.”